Profiles

No 12/8

Update on lignite firing

Lignite-fired power plants are in operation in Asia,
many parts of Europe and in Canada and the USA. Many
of the existing units are old and some are approaching the
end of their service life. There is a need for these units to
be upgraded, repowered or replaced by new power plants.
The power producers will need to assess the best available
technologies and select the options most suited to their
preferred coal types, unit sizes, local conditions and
national compliance requirements. This report reviews the
recent technical innovations and improvements in system
and engineering designs of lignite combustion processes.

Lignite drying technologies

The high moisture content of lignite is a major issue in
its commercial utilisation. In conventional pulverised
lignite fired power plants, a significant amount of the
energy in the coal is absorbed as heat to evaporate the
water present before any useful energy can be obtained and
converted to electricity. This leads to low thermal
efficiency, high CO2 emissions per unit of energy output
and high capital costs of a plant. Other technical
difficulties that arise from high moisture content include
fuel handling problems, difficulty in achieving ignition,
and larger boiler size required due to the increased flue gas
volumetric flow. Therefore, drying of coal prior to
combustion is important to improve thermal efficiency and
consequently reduce CO2 emissions.
Extensive research and investigations have been carried
out worldwide to develop energy efficient and cost
effective coal drying processes. A number of approaches
are taken to dry lignite and other low rank coals. These
technologies broadly fall into two categories: evaporative
drying and non-evaporative dewatering processes.
Recently, several advanced coal drying technologies have
been developed and are offered to the commercial market,
whilst many more are under development. Among these,
the WTA developed by RWE, Germany and the
DryFining developed in the USA by a team led by Great
River Energy (GRE), have been successfully demonstrated
on commercial-scale lignite-fired power generating units.
This is an area that is developing rapidly.

July 2012

Pulverised lignite firing

The major challenge facing the power generation
industry over the coming decades will be to increase the
efficiencies of fossil-fuelled power plants while also
meeting more stringent environmental goals. In particular,
there is a need to reduce the emissions of CO2 to the
atmosphere, with near-to-zero CO2 emissions being the
ultimate goal. At the same time, plant reliability,
availability, maintainability and operational costs, as well
as the cost of electricity (COE), must not be compromised.
Today, most lignite-fired power plants around the world
in operation use pulverised coal combustion (PCC)
technology. The majority of existing pulverised lignite
fired power plants are based on the conventional single
reheat thermal cycle with subcritical steam pressure and
temperature. Recent advances in boiler and turbine
materials have led to the installation of high efficiency
supercritical (SC) or ultra-supercritical (USC) PCC steam
generators. In modern lignite-fired power plants, steam
pressures up to 27.5 MPa and main/reheat steam
temperatures as high as 600C/605C have been applied,
and a net plant efficiency of >43% (LHV) has been
achieved. In addition to the use of advanced steam cycles,
technical innovations in system and process engineering,
larger unit size, improved waste heat recovery from the
flue gas, and optimisation of auxiliary power needs have
all contributed to the plant efficiency increases. Other
technical advances in system and process engineering
include:

improved design of low-NOx burners;

an optimised heat cycle for the regenerative preheat

unit;

the reduction of condenser pressure;

the use of efficiency-improved bladings at the steam

turbines;

increased use of fibre-glass reinforced plastics and

flue gas draw off through the cooling tower;

the introduction of highly efficient after-burning

grates with residues of lower than 1% of unburnt
carbon;

improved combustion chamber cleaning with the help

of water jet sprayers.

IEA Clean Coal Centre is a collaborative project of member countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA)
to provide information about and analysis of coal technology, supply and use. IEA Clean Coal Centre has contracting
parties and sponsors from: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, the European Commission, Germany
India, Italy, Japan, Republic of South Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Sweden,
Thailand, the UK and the USA.

Improvements in process design and engineering not

only increase the total plant efficiencies, but also improve
the availability, flexibility and environmental performances
of the plants and reduce capital and operating costs.
Due to the considerable variation in the quality of
lignite coals, careful selections of technologies and proper
process and engineering designs are required to ensure
lignite-fired plants achieve high efficiency, reliability and
availability, good environmental performance as well as
cost effectiveness. Solutions are available for particular
problems relating to certain coal qualities. The experience
of operating lignite-fired power plants in Germany has
shown that lignite can be burned efficiently to produce
power at competitive prices. It has been proven that
lignite-fired power plants can achieve high efficiency and
have good environmental performance. The high lignite
plant efficiency is achieved by application of advanced
technologies and improved engineering designs to all parts
of the power plant.

PCC versus CFB

There are currently two competing technologies for
lignite firing: pulverised coal combustion (PCC) and
circulating fluidised bed (CFB) combustion. PCC utilises a
proven technology with a very high reliability level. PCC
boilers have the advantage of being able to accommodate
up to 1300 MWe. While the vast majority of existing PCC
boilers use subcritical steam conditions, newly-constructed
supercritical PCC boilers are currently being designed to
apply SC or USC steam conditions. To date, several
ultra-supercritical (USC) PCC boilers are in operation in
China, Europe, Japan, South Korea and USA. The
economies of scale and advanced steam cycle can result in
a significant reduction in total costs as well as lower CO2
emissions, and therefore large SC and USC PCC boilers
will be the preferred choice of technology to subcritical
PCC boilers in future.
Compared to conventional PCC, CFBC is a relatively
young technology. However, CFBC is commercially
proven and has been in reliable electric utility service for
the last two to three decades. Commercial CFBC boilers
offer greater fuel diversity than PCC units, operate at
competitive efficiencies, and when coupled with a
polishing SO2 scrubber and SNCR system, can meet the
increasingly stringent emissions standards.
There have been continued advances in CFBC
technology. Recently, significant developments have been
made in scaling-up of CFBC units and in implementing

super-/ultra-supercritical steam conditions. Today, SC/USC

CFBC units with size up to 800 MWe for bituminous coal
or up to 600 MWe for lignite are commercially available.
The 600800 MWe class CFB boilers will have
performance and economics that are comparable to
corresponding PCC boilers while offering greater fuel
flexibility, especially the ability to burn low heating value
opportunity fuels. The capability to burn fuels with
characteristics unacceptable, or barely acceptable, to PCC
boilers is becoming a key issue for CFB technology
selection. CFB technology will play a key role in
coal-based power generation in the future, especially in
low quality coal and cofiring applications.
A range of advanced combustion technologies has been
developed to improve the efficiency of lignite-fired power
generation. Todays state-of-the-art lignite-fired power
plants in operation in Germany have achieved energy
efficiencies as high as 43%, putting lignite plants in a
similar position as modern hard coal-based power plants.
With modern technologies it is now possible to produce
electricity economically from lignite while addressing
environmental concerns.

Each issue of Profiles is based on a detailed study undertaken by IEA Clean

Coal Centre, the full report of which is available separately. This particular
issue of Profiles is based on the report:
Update on lignite firing
Qian Zhu
CCC/201, ISBN 978-92-9029-521-1,
75 pp, June 2012, 255*/85/42.50
*

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